We've all emigrated to Earth
I was reading Helen Russell’s The Year of Living Danishly (an excellent audiobook by the way - read beautifully and humourously by the author herself) and it jogged within me a very familiar envy - that of beholding those who have ‘moved country’ and started new lives somewhere.
It made me look at where I live, and very much love (the UK) - and what it is about travelling that makes those that don’t travel slightly envious of the nomads of our World.
Sure, we have all the classic reasons for doing so - ‘experience new cultures’. New foods, new climates, new humidity levels, new geographies, new dangers, new landscapes, new smells, new animals, new strange policies and legal contexts, advanced regimes, backward regimes - and whathaveyou.
But it occurred to me - short of an actual trekking holiday and literally not settling anywhere - to stay in another country still boils down to the same basic thing - identify and occupy an abode of some kind, establish infrastructure-based protocols (e.g. do folk walk to the shops, or does everyone need a car, is the country cycle-friendly, etc) - and then - exist, experience.
Where the experience of living can be distilled down to this - then I wondered where exactly does the ‘magic’ of existing lie, if not in travelling?
Then I watched a film or two which got me thinking - there are versions of our future where we travel to various planets and cosmic systems, the way we nonchalantly traverse our inner atmosphere today. In such a time and place - indeed a current time and place if you subscribe to Multiverse theory - there will be people and families who will choose to emigrate to other planets - much as we do countries.
In this scenario - there will be those who look upon those who have chosen to move to Earth as their particular choice with the same semi-envy and wonderment as many do those who move countries. What will it be and feel like over there? What kind of atmosphere, what kind of climate - what will it feel like to interact with its geography? And yes - Earthlings.
And Lo - I am right now experiencing this planet in all of these ways!!
It doesn’t matter what country I happen to have alighted on - wherever I go here, I am on Earth - I am exploring planet Earth from my particular standpoint. That is the stupendous and over-arching fact about my existence right now!
Heck - there are schools of thought which believe that I did literally choose Earth as a destination (à la the animated film ‘Soul’). Where that is so - the amazement is ever the more awe-inspiring.
There are also many different ways to explore something. I don’t have necessarily to scour the surface for all the surfacial differences - I might choose instead to commit to a particular locus and get to know it deeply, across time as well as all the other more usual regards.
The upshot of all of this is - I am more than happy to have landed my particular patch on Earth, and will explore it and appreciate it the way any new visitor to any planet might.